Louis Kahn

Louis Kahn (1901-1974) was an American architect, born in Kuressaare, on an Estonian island then part of the Russian Empire. His family moved to Philadelphia in 1906. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania under Paul Cret, in a curriculum based on the classical Beaux-Arts method, and graduated in 1924. He taught at Yale and Penn, and his major buildings date from the last two decades of his life.

He used brick, exposed concrete and heavy masonry in simple geometric forms, with daylight brought in from above or the sides. At the Richards Medical Research Laboratories at Penn (1957-1965) he separated "served spaces," the laboratories, from "servant spaces," the towers holding stairs and ducts. The Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1959-1965), has two rows of concrete laboratory buildings facing each other across a travertine courtyard divided by a narrow water channel.

The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1967-1972), is roofed with cycloid vaults, long curved concrete shells with a slit along the top that admits daylight. He also designed the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in New Hampshire (1965-1972) and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. His largest project, the National Assembly building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, begun in 1962, was completed in 1982, eight years after he died in New York.